Willliam Borchert

“One clear theme of evolutionary history is the cumulative nature of biological diversity. Individual species (of nucleated organisms at least) may come and go in geological succession, their extinctions emphasizing the fragility of populations in a world of competition and environmental change. But the history of guilds—of fundamentally distinct morphological and physiological ways of making a biological living—is one of accrual. The long view of evolution is unmistakably one of accumulation through time, governed by rules of ecosystem function. The replacement series implied by the Generations of Abraham approach fails to capture this basic attribute of biological history.”
― Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth

“the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group.”
― Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth